Interesting, makes sense to me.

I have noticed, it appears like it's not uncommon for there to be some wires crossed in discussions about porn. Something like:

• Person who opposes porn: thinks everyone is talking about porn involving real people being filmed/photographed in sexual scenarios

• Person who is generally more open to its existence (but may still share the opposition toward porn involving real people): thinks the discussion is about any and all sexualized material, including cartoon lewd drawings, smut writing, etc.

Like I can easily see reason to ban selling of the 1st one, to de-commodify it as much as possible and help people who might otherwise turn to it to make money, make sure they'll never feel pressured to go for that option.

The 2nd one, OTOH, the production of it can be a much more impersonal thing. It can still be harmful in the sense of misrepresenting sex and creating unhealthy expectations, reinforcing misogyny or things of that nature, enabling overwhelming yourself with too much novel stimulation (in the high speed internet form of it). But it's not inherently of a particular ideological bent and is more an enabler of fantasy than it is presented like a depiction of real sex. I mean, how many woman readers of Fifty Shades of Grey actually want to be in the woman's position? None, because fantasizing about something isn't the same as living it. Those kind of stories are not meant to be something you would actually want pushed on you. Part of understanding sexuality is understanding the nature of consenting roleplay, and the difference between a fantasy and real life. I think it is a subject that is severely under-studied due to stigma.

I'm not well versed in the causes (and am curious what sources people may have on them), but I do want to say, a curious part of any conversation about birth rates to me is how common the assumption is that "falling birth rates = bad". On reflection, I find it to be kind of odd because we're living on a planet with billions of people. I do sort of get that logistically, you don't want to have a country with a disproportionately aging population and not enough youth to take over the roles they were doing. But also, if a society is organized more around need than expansion, it should be somewhat feasible to pull back on what is built out and so on, especially with the increasing capability of automated tools.

I don't know, maybe there's something I'm missing, some factor as to why it'd "of course be a bad thing". But although I don't believe in the "overpopulation" narrative as a climate change issue, I also don't see how birth rates staying the same / going up is inherently a good thing. My most pressing concern is the people who are alive and what world they have to deal with, and so much of the pain in that has so much to do with where resources are going rather than how many people are alive to do the labor. Like in countries where resources are going to military rather than public services, is it even worth talking about birth rates? What difference does it make (toward a humane, sustainable society) how many are being born if resources are not going to people's needs anyway? I don't mean that as a shutdown of talking about it; just questioning where the narrative on it typically arises from and for whose interests.

But I would like to hear from people who know more on the subject.

Although I'm sure we can isolate some elements of psychology that are more of a universal observation than they are a sociopolitical lens, I would still emphasize that 1) most of psychology is not that degree of truism/universality and 2) dialectical and historical materialism is itself based on scientific observation. Prole and bougie is not what diamat is fundamentally; it's one historical manifestation of class struggle.

Rejecting diamat doesn't make scientific sense. Rejecting universally consistent facets of psychology doesn't make scientific sense either. But, great care must be taken with thinking surrounding truisms and universality. For example, take a thing like "working memory limits". This is not something that's been consistently studied throughout history, so data on it is going to be limited. That already means that universality of it across history is difficult to back up. It is nevertheless useful to understanding what they are from the data we do have and whether they can fluctuate and why, but this is not the same as them being static across time and history.

I would also point out, though it's a bit of a pedantic point, that neuroscience is not necessarily the same as psychology in the meaning of diagnosing reported feelings and thought patterns, and neuroscience can struggle to find the intersection between what it observes and what is going on inside, because of how dependent psychology research is on self-reporting.

So to reiterate, I'm not trying to say we should "throw out the entirety of the current society's psychology because it is tainted" but rather that it's rarely as straightforward as naming something as a truism and moving on. And that one of the benefits of diamat is explicitly naming the jockeying behind the scenes that diverts research toward one narrative purpose or another.

I perceive myself as abnormally cautious, hesitant, wanting to be thorough (sometimes to the point of inaction). Some of it's anxiety-driven, some I suspect is a predisposition toward looking for threats and anticipating problems. I don't say it as a good thing, but not necessarily a bad thing either. It makes me shy of leadership positions because I can be too plodding and uncertain to take immediate action. Sometimes I think it's the times or a cultural thing though. I had little enough use of technology in the earlier parts of my childhood that I can remember the contrast between that and when I became an adult and started using high-speed internet regularly. There's something about the pacing of things that changes. Not only on how you operate, but how society operates.

For example, a society that needs days or more to send a message from one place to another simply can't move as quickly as a society that can instantaneously send a message across a great distance. This makes snap decision-making more common and more valued. It's strange though because it's not like this means society changes instantaneously. Rapid movement does not mean rapid change, necessarily, since the superstructure has to catch up to the base.

So you can get this "hurry up and wait" feeling a lot. "Why am I even rushing? For what? To where? Is time actually running out quickly or do I only perceive it that way because of the perceived pace of the world?"

I don't know. I feel abnormally older than I am at times. Probably in that messed up childhood way, not actually wise from experience. Life is strange, but I am glad for diamat because it helps ground me in the sea of nebulous western ideologies.

Right, but what's the followup that "take seriously" leads to, that's the thing of it. If women had more political power, they could push back earlier and create consequences for abusers much more readily, which would remove some of the relevance of random people believing it or not.

If I'm Random Nobody hearing about such a claim in the public eye, I'd still say it's better if I take it seriously than if I'm dismissive of it. But in that position, I'm also generally not equipped well to investigate it either and being in a "eh I don't know" position doesn't seem worth a whole lot. Those situations are often somebody making a claim long after the fact and it's their word against the other person's. I understand why it happens that way, don't get me wrong; I'm aware a lot of times people who are abused don't speak out because of things like fear of consequences, or not wanting to harm the person who harmed them, and so on. But nevertheless, the end result is that we run into these cases where you sort of have to either take someone you don't know at their word or "not be dismissive but also not rush to believe it either" which is sort of a weird halfway point to be in and doesn't seem to be meaningfully advancing the liberation of women.

Then there's cases where I may know the person and believing them matters insofar as acknowledging what they've been through, but again, it may be long after it happened or they may not want me to do anything.

Basically what I'm trying to get at is, far more is needed to prevent further abuse and bring consequences, and relying on public opinion to believe a claim is a horrible situation to be in. The metoo movement, for example, got some consequences out of it, which is good, but also a fair amount of "well now what". It's frustrating.

Of course I can still accept this possibility that it might not be true; I’m just very suspicious of the claim when covering up the sex crimes of powerful men is a recurring theme throughout history and despite the great progress the USSR made on the front of women’s liberation there was still a very visible patriarchal culture present right up until the end.

I would say this part is what's important to investigate rather than who was or wasn't a "cop", since LE for the proletariat isn't the same inherently as LE for a parasitic class. And disproportionate sexual abuse of women is an observable side effect of patriarchy. If it was about him being a "cop", I'd would expect more of an indiscriminate abuse, regardless of gender.

Incidentally, the "believe all women" thing is hard for me because even though I want to on principle, there are times when it's like... if I did unthinkingly, I could be lead astray by atrocity propaganda. It's an ugly issue, but I think the core of it comes back to: what women need more than being voluntarily believed, is collective political power. They need enforcement for protections and liberation. The magnanimous trust of some good faith observers will never come close to being enough. This is another area where I would characterize it as liberalism trying to replace literacy of political power with volunteering, like its solution for poverty being charity; this isn't to say that believing women is a negative, just as voluntary charity among the people is not a negative, but also that neither is a systemic solution.

So I keep circling back to (I've rewritten parts of this reply several times now X_X), where was the USSR failing on addressing patriarchy and why. That's probably way more important as information than whether one particular guy was a sex pest.

Just for one example of why this conclusion doesn't make sense:

psychology

Psychology is not an unbiased, purely neutral field of scientific observation. Bourgeoisie psychology (which tends to be very individualist) is not the same as explicitly working class psychology, for example (which will more so promote the collective). Dialectics helps us look past the pretense of neutrality toward the constant interplay of differing class and caste interests (depending on how / what way a society may be stratified). Without it, class analysis is hamstrung in bougie points of view that pretend to be neutral.

That said, I do think the material out there for understanding dialectical and historical materialism can be painfully hard to follow. A large part of that in English material is probably due to the fact that there hasn't been a successful proletarian revolution in the English-as-first-language parts of the world (unless I'm forgetting one). That plus the academic watering down of Marxism in the west to make it more acceptable to the ruling classes, can make it feel a bit "ancient text written on scrolls" trying to engage with what it is and how to put it into practice. The main practitioners of it in history are people who also had to test it against reality, harshly, or their revolution might fail and their people could literally die. It was sink and swim; learn to use the scientific tool or be unequipped to meet the moment. By comparison, the theoretical vacuum academic view of it can make it seem almost quaint, like an odd little hobby of a view that you pick up to clarify a few things.

It's translating time.

Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

Aka: Silicon Valley elites figured out political power derives from the barrel of a gun and want to control the guns.

We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

"We want to mentally prepare you for a world where AI infrastructure demands and possible starting of a war with China makes it hard to get the tech you used to have."

Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

"We are capable of doing neither, but we still want control over the levers of power. Please?"

The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

"They keep dunking on Musk on twitter. They keep calling it twitter even though he renamed it to X! It exposes the fragility of rhetoric [on our part] so we need to beat people up more to stop it. Not exactly sure how though, maybe more apps?"

The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

"If we don't build the Universe Destroying Machine, they will. Do you want us to destroy the universe or them?!?"

National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

"We're in serious decline and no matter how we crow about the need for tech development in war, it's not enough to compensate for flagging interest in getting killed overseas."

If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

"We know people won't give up on freeze peach easily, but we still think people should have to thank military members for their service no matter what and if a soldier asks for a Universe Destroying Machine, should we really say no? Of course not. We will build that Universe Destroying Machine. It's like Build-a-Bear but for soldiers. Those poor dears need to murder or they get sad."

Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

"We believe in running a government like a business... exploiting the public, employees, and eventually bankrupting it so we can move on to the next one."

We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

"Elon Musk's fees fees keep getting hurt from people dunking on him for being a terrible person."

The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

"Elon Musk is getting a bit creeped out by how many fanboys have a parasocial relationship with him."

Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

"It's making the elites uncomfortable how happy some people are about the US losing ground by attacking Iran."

The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

"Never stopped us from starting endless wars though. Heyo!"

No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

"Colonialism is alive and well in our minds, even if not as strong in practice. We still see the world as civil and savage."

American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

Okay I can't even do this one. LOL. LMAO EVEN. The US has been at war nonstop since it became hegemon and was violent since its inception. WW3 has been conducted primarily by the US, inflicting itself on the world. Which is a joke that Norm Macdonald made about Nazi Germany declaring war, but the US actually did it.

The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

"Stopping Nazis in Germany was bad actually, as was stopping imperial Japan. We had to pick up the slack on mass murder where they fell off! It's a heavy burden."

We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

"Poor Elon Musk is the greatest victim of our age. crying face emoji."

Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

"Having the highest incarceration rate is not enough. The US needs to become one big prison colony. They'll be places that are highly concentrated in amounts of people and have tents or something maybe. We'll call them... concentration camps. No wait, not that."

The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

"They keep criticizing Elon Musk!!! When will it end?!?"

The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

"When will we get to say racist things with impunity again?"

The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

"Make America Christian Again"

Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

"Stop trying to criticize colonialism. We're still using it!"

We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

"Allowing non-whites into the mix might dilute our racism framework."

I guess if by "leftists," you mean socdems, then yeah because they tend to be imperialists who want minor reforms. Beyond that, it's more complicated. For example, there's an important difference between "a defector could be helpful" (strategic) and "avoid doing harm to people who are actively doing harm" (pacifist). There's also a difference between "yankee anti-imperialists trying to outmaneuver the empire on loyalty of soldiers" (strategic) and "handing over the reigns of a burgeoning movement to them" (not taking power or ideological discipline seriously). Being clear on these distinctions is critical and I don't mean as abstract definition, but as characterizing accurately what kind of organizing or propaganda people are doing and working out if it's a problem.

Like what Lenin did, for example. Not that it was only him, but one thing he is known for is working out who is peddling bullshit and separating them out as a distinct tendency from what he's doing with explanations as to why the difference matters and why it's a problem. He couldn't afford to let generalizations obfuscate differing tendencies and neither can we.

Edit: typo

I did some searching. It's (probably) this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEoIUoH6kZY

But I did not compare against facebook. OP may be able to confirm.

Tbh, though I appreciate your effort to explain how to make it clearer (it's a solid breakdown on language use), I tend to be of the view that unless you really know your audience (ex: you're speaking to a close friend who you can trust knows you and knows your tells for joking and serious) it's almost always better to say outright whether you're joking.

One point made in this thread is that not doing so makes it more difficult for people on the autism spectrum. But it's not only that. There's a reason Poe's law become an adage on the internet:

The observation that, on the Internet, without a clear indication of the author's intent, it is impossible to tell the difference between sincere extremism and a parody of extremism.

In particular, in ideological spaces, there's real risk that parody of reactionary views can be used as a means of laundering real reactionary views through irony poisoning:

Irony poisoning is the process or altered state wherein one has a diminished capacity for distinguishing between one's own genuine beliefs and ironic beliefs through an overuse of irony. This can manifest in either an inability to state one's beliefs in a genuine way or genuinely echoing provocative sentiments they once held only ironically.

Or through a process like that of what is sometimes called "Schrodinger's douchebag":

Someone who is a jerk and decides whether they were joking or not based on how people reacted.

I've been wanting to write a longer post on this subject for some time, but never quite got around to it. In general, it seems to me that the common western view on parody and satire, that it's somehow more clever/valuable/compelling if it is not explicitly and openly called attention to as such, is rooted in elitism rather than effectiveness (e.g. the idea is that there are the ones who are "clever enough of mind" to get it and the ones who aren't, and the ones who aren't are supposed to be left out - otherwise, why not say what it is?). Sans elitism, the "why not specify" could have some validity in theory. For example, I could imagine a scenario where speech is so criminalized that using satire to speak in code may have some value. However, that's generally not what people are dealing with on the western English-speaking internet; either speech is not criminalized to such a degree or when it is, satire doesn't help as "code" because of how easily it can be mistaken for the real thing and the anonymity means you won't generally speaking to people who know you in order to decipher your true meaning.

Also tagging @Bronstein_Tardigrade@lemmygrad.ml because I think it's worth you considering this perspective on the subject.

worshipping statehood

It's funny because they strawman ML in the same sentence as saying that MLs are strawmanning anarchists.

Like I'm pretty sure I haven't come across a single self-professed ML who fawns over statehood inherently. More like a lot of wearied baby* leftists developing into a mind that there's going to have to be a transition period. That history+theory shows said transition works as a centralized vanguard-run state and that if you try to force decentralization early out of some misguided sense of principle, you just get picked off by counterrevolution and reaction.

*in the meaning of newer to it, not immature people

Thanking comrade Che's Motorcycle as well for prompting the AI and getting this cute image to us. :)

Welcome! I didn't know that about Gandhi. I remember hearing vaguely in the past that his "nonviolence" stuff wasn't all it was cracked up to be, but I didn't know it was as insidious as all that. Can't say it surprises me though with how brutal colonialism and imperialism tends to be. It's amazing sometimes the stuff out there that is a plainly stated quote you can find, that they aren't even hiding it, and people don't know cause they aren't exposed to the information. Like it makes me think of in the US context, the guy who was known as the "father of suburbs" who has a quote along the lines of that a person can't be a communist if they are a homeowner because they don't have enough time to be one while maintaining it (like he thought this was a good thing).

Turning to violence to settle a grievance is never the answer.

Those poor tissues, he violently destroyed them, so now the bourgeoisie cannot mop up their tears with them. Such violence, very destruction.

In all seriousness though, it's such absurdity. I know this is how capitalism operates, but it will never not be absurd to me watching them compare destruction of property to destruction of life. Were he destroying vital food stores, you could make an argument that it is, by extension, violence against people. But a warehouse of paper goods? Laughable to frame it that way. He hit the bourgeoisie where they hurt (the pocketbook) without directly attacking anyone. But they'll call it violence because to them, hurting their profits is tantamount to striking them.

The crux of your criticism seems to be claiming that China has prioritized its own interests at the cost of the international working class, but your closing statement contradicts this outright. If the most important goal is the proletarian revolution, then it stands to reason that the most important action on China's part is developing and reinforcing the revolution that they do have (rather than a hypothetical one in another country that they don't have), and that if anything, the USSR fell because it tried to do too much in other countries and prioritized its internal state too little.

There are other points we could go over, but that seems to be the most pressing.

Other points:

It abandoned class analysis

Pure nonsense that does not hold up to scrutiny.

Examples include the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the FNLA in Angola, and trying to get North Vietnam to capitulate to a ceasefire leaving a divided country like Korea during the Vietnam War.

The USSR also made geopolitical blunders and misjudgements in post-WWII. A mistake is not the same thing as being revisionist.

China began collaborating with the US. Against the USSR in many cases.

rather than unite against imperialism and capitalist exploitation, they facilitated it in many ways.

Citations desperately needed. Again, this is little different than saying allied with. It is also in contradiction with implying that China prioritized its own interests, as allying with imperialism would not further its interests.

Were China an ally of imperialism, it would be praised by the empire, not vilified constantly. It is precisely because China is a threat to the empire that it gets vilified from both left and right, in ongoing attempts to reduce it to nothing more than a caricature of "power gone wrong", whether from the perspective of "evil commies" or "used to be commie and got lost to revisionism". This reductionist perspective is two sides of the same shitty coin.

It is tiresome, this song and dance about how China (or any socialist project) should bend over backward to support any and all revolutionary efforts in other countries, but at the same time, imply that those efforts are justified in throwing it under the bus as being revisionist if it doesn't support them in particular, especially in the precise way that they want. China is not a superhero. It is a complex entity made up of over a billion people. It's not a savior or villain. It's neither revisionist nor is it without fault. When it comes to difficult decisions on the global stage, there is plenty of blame to go around and in recent history (recent as in last hundreds of years or so), most of that blame lands squarely on the shoulders of colonialism and its development into imperialism. Something China has staunchly avoided engaging in, no matter the accusations that get levied its way (for example, the claims pushed by the empire itself that China is bad for helping other countries develop infrastructure, as if that's inherently the same as making them a dependent) and China was even a victim of colonialism when dealing with Japan's aggression. The least people can do is give them credit for not being another arm of genociding humankind.

I had this thought/realization earlier that although I've made a lot of progress on learning about ML stuff, there are times where, when I am under stress, I appear to fall back on idealism thought. It's interesting how that works, but it makes a kind of sense to me. Idealism is what I grew up with, what was instilled in me from a young age, so it's the reflexive response, the low effort, low energy coping mechanism.

This doesn't mean, however, that it's a healthy coping mechanism. Part of the reason I was being conscious of it was because of turning inward and noting that the response I was having was detrimental to myself. I don't want to go into the personal details of what it was about, but in essence, I was noticing this kind of interplay between fatalism and magical thinking of idealism. The fatalism is the negative spiral end of it. The magical thinking is the "attempt to be positive" (without diamat grounding), that kind of thinking like sheer power of will is going to overcome. The fatalism/doomer/depressed thinking is a direct response to the failure of idealism thought. When it doesn't hold up to reality as is easily the case, it can start a negative spiral. Idealism thought builds positivity via sand castles, for lack of a better metaphor, so it easily gets swept away.

The solution is probably to make more of a conscience effort to practice diamat in day to day ways. After all, it is by practice that I internalized idealism, not just by being told about it. And I can't unlearn idealism fully until there is something to take its place.

China he considered revisionist due to the Three Worlds Theory, their embrace of bourgeois nationalism, and their alliance with the US and other capitalist states under the US’s sway. Rather than committing to anti-imperialist solidarity, they chose to align with imperialist interests. Deng’s reforms further supported this claim.

the Three Worlds Theory

From what I can find on this, I have no idea what this is supposed to have to do with being revisionist.

their embrace of bourgeois nationalism

What does this even mean.

their alliance with the US and other capitalist states under the US’s sway

When has CPC-run China ever been in alliance with the US? Trading with them is one thing, having an alliance based on shared interests is a whole other thing and in the case of China of the Deng era interacting with the US, an alliance would have to mean bowing to imperialism and helping further it in some way. There is no other way you ally with an empire like that.

Rather than committing to anti-imperialist solidarity, they chose to align with imperialist interests.

Again, what have they done that aligns with imperialist interests.

Thanks for translating, really interesting.